The Wizard of London
Page 23
They closed the book and looked at each other, the odd sourish smell of an old book still in their nostrils.
“Well,” Sarah said finally, “you have enough to write that report for Mem’sab now.” And it was true that she did, but the results were less than satisfying.
Nan nodded. “But it don’t solve the mystery,” she added, feeling obscurely disappointed.
“Crumbs,” Tommy said, clearly disappointed. “It doesn’t. Maybe Mem’sab will have some ideas where to look next.”
Nan sighed, and went to fetch pen and paper to write her report. She had no illusions about her report winning the coveted place at Mem’sab’s side, but now she was far more interested in getting to the bottom of this than going to the Horse Fair.
***
She had to wait until she was alone with the headmistress before she could bring up the topic. “I wonder,” Mem’sab said slowly, after she and Nan had finished another of her “special” lessons. “I wonder if there isn’t a way to find something out about the mysterious body in the well directly.” And she looked straight at Nan.
The implication was obvious, since Nan had just completed another lesson in psychometry, one in which she had learned to tell how far back in time a particular reading on an object had taken place. They were sitting in the parlor, and Nan had just “read” one of the old vases there, a huge blue-and-white monstrosity that was always full of fresh flowers.
“Wot? Me?” Nan said, startled. “ ‘Ow? We ’aven’t got the skellington, or even them silver buttons.” Whatever had become of those objects was a mystery, though Nan figured they had been buried along with the remains. They weren’t novel enough, nor old enough, to have entered Lord Mathew’s collection of artifacts and souvenirs.
“The well, Nan,” Mem’sab pointed out. “You can ‘read’ the well itself.”
“Oo-eck.” Nan could have hit herself for not thinking of that solution earlier. “ ‘Course I can! Mind, there’s been a lot ‘uv people gone and touched that well since, things’ll be a bit dimlike.”
Mem’sab gave her an admonishing look. “Don’t you think that’s all to the good? Considering that we are discussing the circumstances that led to a man’s perishing there, laden with chains? This is not something that I would care to experience at first hand.”
Nan shrugged. Sometimes Mem’sab forgot how little Nan had been sheltered from. Murder in Whitechapel was a way of life, so to speak. “ ‘Sides,” she continued, “I got Neville now. He stood down that nasty thing in Berkeley Square. I don’t reckon something that never did wuss than swear ‘ud bother him none.”
From the back of the chair beside her, Neville bobbed his head, fluffed his feathers, and uttered a short “quork.”
“I am more than willing for you to try this, or I would not have suggested it in the first place,” Mem’sab said, interlacing her fingers together in her lap. “However, there are some things we should consider first, and discuss, you and I, and things that I should research myself. I don’t want you plunging headfirst into this, and especially I do not want you doing this without me. Do I have your word?”
With a sigh, and with a glare from Neville that suggested that if she did not promise, he might well give her a good peck, she gave her word.
“First of all, although the memories are old and the remains are no longer physically present, a spirit could still be bound to the place of its death and you could awaken it,” Mem’sab said thoughtfully. “That could be good—we might be able to convince it to go on its way—or bad—because it might attack. So at the very least, I need to be there, and most of the children need to be kept away. I would prefer it if Sahib and possibly Agansing could also be present. Agansing’s people have a great deal of experience with Ancestor Spirits, both good and bad, and that might come in handy.”
“Most of the others—you’re thinkin’ Sarah ought to be there, too?” Nan hazarded.
Mem’sab nodded, but reluctantly, keeping her eyes focused on Nan’s. “Yes and no. Yes, because if there is a spirit, she is the one most likely to be able to speak to it. And no, because if there is a spirit, it may attempt to take her.”
“There’s Grey—” Nan pointed out. “She’s Sarah’s protector. Right?”
“Ye-es,” Mem’sab agreed, but with some doubt. “I simply don’t know how powerful a protector Grey is. And there is also the possibility that you could be harmed by this as well. These are all things that need to be balanced.”
With a sigh, Nan agreed. By this point, it was pretty obvious that Mem’sab was not going to march straight down to the well and have Nan try her power of seeing things in something’s past right soon. It was going to wait until the weekend, at best, which was when Sahib would be coming.
She did, however, go tell Sarah about Mem’sab’s idea that night at bedtime. Both Sarah and Grey listened attentively.
And Sarah, who was sitting in bed clasping her knees with her arms, shivered when she had finished. “I’m not very brave,” she said quietly. “Not like you, Nan.”
Nan snorted. “Brave enough,” she said roughly. “ ‘Ow brave is brave, an’ when does it spill over to daft? Eh? I done plenty daft things some ‘un might say was brave.”
Sarah had to laugh at that. “I don’t like to think of anything trapped or in pain, or both,” she went on. “But that horrible thing in Berkeley Square—it scared me, Nan. I don’t ever want to see anything like that again.”
“No more do I, but this thing, the well, it don’t feel like that thing in London,” Nan pointed out. Then she sighed. “Really, though, we ain’t got a choice. We’ll get to do what Mem’sab says we can.”
“That’s true, and Mem’sab won’t let us do anything that is really dangerous,” Sarah replied, brightening, and changed the topic to speculation on who was going to win the coveted expedition to the Horse Fair.
But Nan stared up at the ceiling after the candles were out with her hands behind her head, thinking. It was true that Mem’sab would normally not let them do anything dangerous…
Not knowingly. But even Mem’sab was concerned that there were hidden dangers here she could not anticipate.
That factor alone was enough to give Nan pause, and she tried to think of things that maybe Mem’sab would not, only to decide that this was an exercise in futility.
Oh, well, she decided finally, as she gave up the fight to hold off sleep. Things’ll ‘appen as they ’appen, like Gram used to say. Let’t‘morrow take care of itself.
11
MEMSA’B, Nan decided, looked worried, but was hiding it well. Nan was more excited than worried, and Neville looked positively impatient to get things started.
Sarah, however, was showing enough nerves for both of them. And she wasn’t even the one who was going to be investigating the well and its haunt in the first place!
“Glaah,” said Neville, and Nan got the sense of “of course she’s nervous, she’s nervous for you!” And immediately she felt a little ashamed of herself. Besides Sarah had said herself she wasn’t “brave like Nan,” and it wasn’t nice to be scornful of her for something she had admitted to herself!
And with that thought, she shook her head at how strange her life had become. Not that long ago, would she have cared what anyone thought? Would she have cared that she herself had thought things about someone that weren’t very nice?
No, of course not. It wouldn’t have mattered. When you were going to bed hungry every night, nothing much mattered except finding a way to scrounge another bit of food. When you got thrown out in the street in the middle of winter, all that mattered was that you could find the penny for a place under a roof that night. Whether or not you thought something about someone that might hurt their feelings if they found out was so far from being relevant to how you lived—
It struck her for a moment how much her life had changed, and in her heart she apologized to Sarah for belittling her. Neville rubbed his beak against her cheek.
Beside Mem’sa
b were Sahib and Agansing, the latter looking entirely serene. That gave Nan heart; for Agansing was the one person she thought likeliest to sense incipient trouble before it became a problem.
Excluding the other children would have been tricky, except for one thing. The new pony had arrived, and all of them were down at the stable, being introduced, and taking their turns with him. There had been neither black ponies nor white at the Horse Fair, only varying shades of brown, which averted that particular crisis—the chosen beast was an affectionate little gelding with two white feet and a white blaze. Tommy—who had won the coveted position—immediately named him “Flash,” but Flash’s main pace was an amble, so he wasn’t likely to live up to it. He had been advertised as being trained to ride or drive, so presumably everyone was going to be reasonably satisfied with him.
But with that sort of a draw down at the stables, probably no one was going to notice that Nan and Sarah weren’t there. And even if they did, it was reasonable to assume that Sarah, raised in Africa, and Nan, raised on the London streets, hadn’t ever had ponies, and probably didn’t know how to ride or drive.
Which was, of course, true.
Nan had, in fact, encountered the pony and had not been impressed. In comparison to Neville, it came off a poor second in her opinion.
It was no hardship to either Nan or Sarah to be here, rather than at the stables with the rest.
They were all waiting for one thing: Karamjit to return from the stable, with word that the rest were all now fully involved with the pony and unlikely to take it into their heads to come back to the manor and go looking for Mem’sab, Sarah, or Nan.
And at length, Karamjit did appear, stalking around the corner of the hedge like a two-legged panther, taking his place beside Sahib. With that arrival, Mem’sab nodded at Nan, who braced herself, approached the well, laid both bare hands on the stone coping, closed her eyes, and slowly let herself “see” what was there.
There was an immediate surge of terror, but she had expected that and pushed past it. It was the reaction of that long-ago worker to discovering a corpse, and she had suspected this would be something she would sense very strongly. It was relatively recent in the life of the well, and it was powerful. With it came panic, the sense of being stifled and trapped, fleeting images of rough walls and above all, the need to get out. It didn’t last long, and she moved beyond the moment.
Then, there was nothing, for a very long time.
Well, not nothing, precisely, but only vague whispers of a thousand passing personalities that hardly left an imprint at all; merest hints of emotion, piled one atop another in a confusing heap, and nothing much in the way of images. She was used to this sort of pattern emanating from a very old object, but the well was so public a place and it was so easy for people to brush a bit of themselves on it in passing that it was like pushing her way through endless, ghostly branches in a haunted forest without an end—
Then—
A force hit her like a runaway wagon.
Damn you!
Words—oh, yes—definitely words, but impact that shook her and made her fall forward against the stone wall of the well.
The anger, the fear, the despair struck her with all the immediacy of a physical blow.
Immediately, she felt Neville push himself into her neck, as her hands clutched the rough stone, and her body reeled along with her mind. She reached for his mental presence even as she managed to raise a hand to touch his neck, and the feelings receded.
But not so far that she could not read them.
She had images now, a dark-clad body curled into a fetal ball, chained hand and foot. A man, dying of thirst, knowing he was dying, and such rage in him that the rage itself took on what was left of his life force.
I know this part, she thought. She pushed past the images and the rage. This was the ending, the last bitter moments of a life. She needed to see where it started—
More images flooded her; she let them come. She knew that the best way for her to decipher the past of an object was to allow all the images to flood in at once, and sort them out after she had taken them in.
The well had “seen” the man, but the well had no eyes, so she would never know what the man had actually looked like, other than that he was lean, and his clothing was dark and quite plain…
Another surge of emotion, more sustained this time; outrage rather than anger, and fear. Disbelief. Horror. Each of these in turn, all linked with a thought: they’re not coming back!
Who was not coming back? No answer there; only the long-ago press of emotion as a man realized that he had been forgotten, abandoned, left to a fate that had only one ending.
“ ‘E can’t believe this. Whoever put ‘im in there either forgot about ‘im or somethin’ happened,” she heard her own voice saying dreamily. “He’s hearin’ commotion an’ ‘e reckons it’s the whole household packin’ up an’ leavin’ and not knowin’ ‘e’s down ‘ere. ‘E’s been yellin’, but nobody ’erd ‘im.” More images, and then, not images at all, but the things that had happened were happening to her; being lowered carefully into the well, head ringing from the blows, licking swollen lips and tasting blood, unable to see out of one eye. Anger at being defeated, at being caught. No words now, only feelings, emotional and physical.
There was a kernel there that was Nan, that knew it was a little girl, that the country was ruled by a Queen and not a King, that none of this was real. There was the sense of an anchor, a protector, who sheltered that kernel of herself. She had to just let it all wash over her, and not try to fight it, because fighting would only wear her out and thin her hold on herself.
She closed in on herself, made herself like a hard little stone, the kind you got in your shoe and couldn’t get rid of. This wasn’t an attack, any more than the foot in the shoe was an attack on the stone. There wasn’t even a person behind it. This was all just idiot emotion, left behind by the trauma of long ago. Maybe there had been a ghost at one time, howling to be found, cursing those who passed by. If so, Christian burial, even though no one knew what name to put on a marker, had probably put an end to the haunts.
Finally, the little stone that was Nan dropped out of the swirling chaos of left-behind emotions. She had come through it. She was on the other side.
She opened her eyes, blinked twice, and sat down quite suddenly on the ground.
***
Isabelle shook her head. “A mystery still,” she mused. “From Nan’s description, I would guess that the man was a Roundhead, perhaps a spy? For whatever reason, someone here decided he was a menace and imprisoned him in the well.”
“And didn’t tell anyone else,” her husband pointed out. “That was where it all fell apart. We know why no one came to let him out—there was no one here.”
Now that they knew what to look for, they knew that as the Royalists lost ground to Oliver Cromwell’s troops, the family here had abandoned their manor, taken all the portable wealth they could muster, and fled across the Channel. As it happened, they had a great deal of “portable” wealth, and they had been able to get across the countryside and into France with no real difficulty. Others who had waited longer had not been so lucky…
Frederick stretched, accepted a cup of tea from Isabelle, and looked to Agansing. “You’re certain that this wasn’t deliberate murder?” he asked. “Clearing that well of the taint of something like murder—”
Agansing shook his head. “The man’s captors were hardly kind, but there is no trace in the original thought patterns that he anticipated such a thing here.”
“Besides, dearest, why would anyone go to the trouble of binding and chaining him, then lowering him carefully into the well, if they intended to murder him?” Isabelle pointed out. “It would have take far less effort to simply knock him on the head or shoot him and throw him in the river. If he was found at all, it would be assumed he was another casualty of the war. It’s what I would have done if I had wanted to murder someone at that date.”
She sniffed. “Really, Frederick, I am only saying what I would have done, had I a wicked nature and been inclined to murder someone during the Civil War, not that I would countenance doing any such thing.”
He chuckled; he’d been teasing her, of course, but she was a little irritated at him. It was not the sort of teasing she enjoyed.
Well, perhaps her nerves were irritated by being in proximity to the negative emotions in that wellhead for so long. She sat on her irritation and went on. “We definitely need to cleanse the place, or something might well take advantage of the situation. You saw for yourself how readily little Nan became absorbed; there is a great deal of energy there, and if we still have an enemy to Nan and Sarah, that place could be used to feed and hold a truly dangerous entity.”
Frederick nodded. “I completely agree.” He rose, cracked his knuckles, and held out his hand to assist her to rise. “And there is no time like the present.”
Cordelia was angry.
The servants sensed it, and stayed as far out of her reach as possible. She would have taken her anger out on David, but he had gone off to a country house party for the next several days. She had been invited, but she had turned the invitation down; the host bored her, the hostess was worse, and it would have been one stultifying round of lawn tennis and croquet in the afternoons, and rubbers of bridge and politics in the evenings. Except she would have been excluded from the politics, relegated to gossip and amateur theatrics with the ladies, and the politics were the only part of the house party she would have found interesting.
But several important men had been invited, which meant that David had to go. So he was not here to suffer the sting of her anger either.
She sat in her exquisite parlor, and after long, hard consideration, she leveled her gaze on an extremely expensive porcelain vase David had given her, full of water and white lilies that were nearly as expensive as the vase. She stared at it; obedient to her will, the little cold Elementals that looked like white, furred snakes wrapped themselves around the lilies and began to freeze them.